What is Video Blogging and it’s Advantages

We have talked a lot about Video-blogging and recently we talked about viral video marketing. Even after that, if you have not started producing videos for your brand, blogs, here I’ll talk about some of the advantages of Video blogging, which will urge you to start with first personally created video.

What is Video Blogging?

Like any other form of Blogging, video blogging (vlog) is done with the help of videos. You either self host your video or use free services like YouTube, Vimeo to host your videos. Like a normal blog, your video will be visible to public and they can rate, comment and share your videos. Only big difference is we will be using videos to share the information instead of text.

For example, I could have simply created a video talking about benefits of video blogging and upload it on YouTube. A brand, can talk about how to use their product and other information. Since videos are interactive and give more detailed information, people often turn to look for video reviews, walk-through and tutorials.

Advantages of Video Blogging:

Depending upon your strategy, you can host videos on free video hosting site like YouTube (with few limitations), Vimeo, metacafe and many more or better host content on your site and allow users to embed videos on their site, which will give more exposure to your brand and videos. Though, for personal video blog, you need to make sure you have good command over Spoken English and you can prepare a proper strategy for complete video marketing plan.

Professional companies and media brand can hire professionals to create awesome videos for them and especially, you can work on creating a related content strategy for video blog to educate your readers and drive more people. For example: if you are selling video hosting services, you can create videos on what all features of self hosted hosting should offer. This way, you are not only educating people but also driving client to your site. You can apply similar strategy for your brand.

So enough of talking and now it’s time to see what all benefits we will get from targeting video fans:

Exposure:

With more and more blogs being published daily, bloggers prefer making channels on video sharing websites like YouTube to get more exposure. However recent researches have shown that videos are more watched, enjoyed and shared than the text content. If you make a video and a text content then it will be easy to get more video views than text content impressions. Also when we see a video on Facebook we are more likely to watch it rather reading a long description below an image shared on Facebook. People enjoy watching videos rather reading content. Also videos have more visual effects than a text content along with images. So here we will discuss about few advantages of video blogging.

Great Videos easily go Viral:

Videos are more likely to go viral than a text content. Recently many video spams hit Facebook. All of them looked like a video ready to be played. Nearly no text content spam went as much viral as a video spam went. This proves the point that people are more likely to watch videos on Facebook rather reading text. This strategy when adopted for the promotion of a blog can unveil incredible results. So why not go with this strategy? Many web companies have video channels at YouTube. This helps them get more traffic and keep in contact with their readers that are more active on YouTube than on any other social networking website.

Interactive and descriptive:

Video blogs are more interactive and descriptive. With the correct use of visual effects and a little hard work in producing good videos you can teach your audience in a better way. Video blogging enhances your persuasion ability and chances of increasing conversion rate increases. You can convince the viewers and increase your sales.

Works great for Tutorial:

Video blogs are best for tutorial blogs. Tutorials blogs usually require a lot of text in them. If you want to teach someone you can use video blogs rather publishing a huge compilation of text. This will help your readers keep engaged in the content. I’ve searched for GIMP (Adobe Photoshop like software) tutorials on the Internet and I’ve always gone for video tutorials rather reading the text. This is because the blogger can give a demonstration of what he/she wants to display.

Live video Blogging:

With the advance in video technologies, Live blogging has been made easy. Now people can live blog the event with the help of videos. This is well-known by the word “live streaming”. Bloggers and journalists can use this technique to quickly blog about breaking news. This doesn’t take as much time than a text blogging needs. All you need is good speaking skills and you are done publishing your own video. But when it comes to text blogging then you need to go through with multiple drafts to eliminate any errors in your writing.

For better search engine visibility of video, I would suggest you to create a video sitemap for your website and submit it to Google like any other sitemap. This guide from ReelSEO would help you to optimize your videos for better visibility.

Though, there are some disadvantages of video blogging too, which you should keep in your mind before jumping into the list of video Bloggers.

Disadvantages of Blogging:

Cost:

If you are self hosted videos, it’s going to cost a lot on bandwidth and storage. There are many free tools which you can use to create videos but for a professional video tutorial, you need paid software’s like Camtasia.

Creating constant content:

Creating professional videos back to back is not possible and require lots of work. Specially, editing and finalizing your video is going to take more time. Also, you need to work on transcript for better videos, which is again more work, but helps a lot if you are embedding videos on your blog.

Anyhow, there are not much cons of video blogging and by the end it’s very useful and helps you to go viral.

I hope these advantages are enough to inspire you to jump into video blogging. If you consider starting it then make sure that you share your videos on other video sharing websites too rather sticking to YouTube only.

This is a guest post by Debasis from DigitalGyaan . If you would like to write for ShoutMeLoud, read our guest posting guidelines.

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Debasis Pradhan is a Software/Web Developer, SEO Analyst and Founder of Digital Gyaan, one of the most Popular How-to Blogs on the web.
You can connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Google+ at +Debasis Pradhan.

Video are also best ways to increase blog traffic like we create and submit our video to popular video sites and add our blog link in description. This is a great way to get traffic 🙂 BTW awesome post keep it up

First of all Thanks to all my friends who are commented over this post. This is my first Post over this Blog so I’m feeling very good today. Your each inspirational comment Motivate me to write some useful post for you.

You are absolutely right Ammar, I usually make Videos for my clients and then make it fully SEO optimized and then share it in lots of Video sharing sites.

Nice Post an unique one,I never thought about this form of blogging though I had seen BoB parson’s video blog the famous godaddy owner. but I didn’t take it seriously ..I think the tutorial type video blogging can be a hit or can go viral. Thanks again for sharing.

Thanks For the Comment. Ya I personally like Bob’s Video Blog as I have subscribed to his Video blog. He always post lovely inspirational Videos in his Blog, if one will watch all of them then he will learn many good things.

You are right about making Video Blogging on tutorials, there are many other good Video blogs available where you will find lots of Good and useful Videos on different topics. These kinds of Video blogs are very viral because everyday many people searching for online Video tutorials for any of their desired subjects/topics.
Thanks

It’s a nice post. I’ve a problem of speaking English, so can I create videos with the help of sliding of images or recording of screen with putting some text into it with music in background. Is it possible to create videos?

@Nikhil
Many people are doing this and they getting good results. Though I suggest to start speaking, as it may sound not so prefect in the beginning but later on it will improve. Or you can use some text to speed converter and sync the audio with video. Make sure to use subtitles to make most out of it.

I have a blog and i am planning for video tutorial, Which is best practices? Placing directly video on blog or placing video directly on youtube?

I have seen that Moz has now shifted their video to the website, addiotnally i have heard from bruceclay that “adding video on website will bring traffic directly to your website, you just need to add xml video sitemap on webmaster tool” And whatever link juice you are getting for the page – it will also help to boost your video ranking in serp.

Thanks for this useful video blogging post… I also have tried to make video tutorial with HyperCam 2 but I had the voice issues and I cannot afford Camtasia. can you suggest any other screen capturing software that can have full voice clarity?

Camtasia is a great piece of software! We set up one of our clients with it and they’ve been successful so far. Coming from professional industry, I’m used to editing on highly powerful software programs. It was surprising how good the consumer program was.

If you have a great camera, and good editing skills thats great. Or if you have enough money to pay someone to do it for you. But i know some great people that make videos with their phones. If you have a decent phone camera and interesting things to say, sometimes is enogh

That’s right! And more importantly, you can always make videos that look somewhat professional with little knowledge and budget, so really there aren’t many excuses not to use video for promoting yourself and what you’re selling.

how can one protect his/her original blog content including his unique style, he/she is producing for any blogging including video?
what if 2 people happen to write on the same subject with the same style or similar words, but original writer with less no. of followers getting no credit & some stealer enjoying the magic of content in public by stealing the original content & style from the low -profile writer? Is there any way to avoid such things happening?